The present invention is related to systems and methods for accessing a magnetic storage medium, and more particularly to systems and methods for controlling access to a magnetic storage medium.
A read channel integrated circuit (IC) is one of the core electronic components in a magnetic recording system such as a hard disk drive. A read channel converts and encodes data to enable magnetic read heads to write data to the disk drive and then read the data accurately. The disks in a drive typically have many tracks on them. Each track typically consists of user data sectors, as well as control or “servo” data sectors interspersed between the user data sectors. The servo data sectors help to position the magnetic recording head on a track so that the information stored in the read sectors is retrieved properly. In addition, various marks are interspersed in the user data and may be relied upon as feedback for a phase lock loop used to control a clock sampling the data. At times, however, noise is introduced in the channel that causes a failure in the identification of one or more elements included in a particular servo data sector or in the marks interspersed in the user data. Because of this, data may be lost or improperly interpreted during a read operation.
Hence, for at least the aforementioned reasons, there exists a need in the art for advanced systems and methods for accessing a magnetic storage medium.